It is no surprise that pastoral has proved to be one of the more important areas of study for Cervantes scholars. Although it is not a dominant issue in Don Quijote the fact that his first book was a pastoral romance has tempted commentators to explore aspects of his later works by reference to the pastoral ethos, first incorporated in La Galatea. Such a consideration extends to those works, like La ilustre fregona (The Illustrious Kitchen Maid), that at first sight appear removed from sixteenth-century Spanish pastoral fiction. Two factors perhaps have been responsible for this probing for evidence of traces of the genre in unpromising settings. First, there is the nature of La Galatea itself and the way in which it has not yielded to a critical consensus. According to Mary Malcolm Gaylord some critics see it as ‘too pastoral and insufficiently Cervantine’, while others acknowledge that it is ‘quite recognizably its author's work, but imperfectly pastoral’. Little wonder then that Elizabeth Rhodes should refer to it as ‘a text which is categorized as pastoral with some hesitancy’. Secondly there is the protean quality of the term ‘pastoral’. It ranges from the precisely delimiting, as when referring to the competing songs of shepherds, following a Theocritan or Virgilian model, to a definition such as ‘any literature which deals with the complexities of human life against a background of simplicity’. The image of Cervantes as a pioneer, as a ‘modern’ writer, readily encourages the broader acceptance of the term so that there is every reason for viewing works such as La ilustre fregona and La gitanilla (The Little Gypsy Girl) as, if not quite versions of pastoral, then certainly as texts that incorporate it. In the case of the former, the author himself provides the most blatant of nudges and winks at the very start when Carriazo's experience of the picaresque life in the tunny fisheries is couched in terms of the locus amoenus of pastoral.We might mistake the following sentence for a paraphrase of Garcilaso, the opening of such poems as his Canción III or Égloga II: ‘ni el andar a pie le cansaba, ni el frío le ofendía, ni el calor le enfadaba.